The Hindu Business Line : Auto cos on mission `Catch 'em Young'

Pune June 22 Engineering students in the country who dream of designing tomorrow's cars have never had it better. Around 400 budding engineers from 27 colleges are under the scanner of some of the nation's leading auto companies. They are the teams short-listed to participate in the first BAJA (pronounced Baha) SAE India 2007, a competition to build an all terrain vehicle called Baja that will be held in Pithampur, near Indore, from December 21-23.

Event sponsors

And the cars they churn out might just be the forerunners to some innovative designs that might hit the road in the years to come.

Auto majors such as Mahindra and Mahindra, Ford India and JK Tyres are amongthe sponsors of the first event in the country modelled on the globally popular student competition Mini-Baja initiated by the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE), USA.

A two-day workshop to familiarise the short-listed 27 (of 52 teams that applied) about the real-time mechanics of car designing was flagged off by F1 champion Narain Karthikeyan at the Automotive Research Association of India recently.

Each of the participating teams will be supplied with transmissions from M&M and 9 HP petrol engines by Lombardini India free-of-cost, and a cheque of Rs 2 lakh per team from a sponsor.

Bharat Forge, Emitec, Lucas TVS, M&M and Charutar Vidya Mandal have come forward, and Dr Pawan Goenka, President M&M, and the chief supporter of the event, believes that sponsorship for the remaining 22 teams will not be a problem.

The idea, Dr Goenka asserts is to give youngsters a real-world engineering project and to get them "excited about the manufacturing industry''.

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